Bed Hang is a biweekly conversational column between Harron Walker and Larissa Pham. Rather than taking an argumentative stance that only serves to reaffirm what they already think, Pham and Walker offer productive conversations intended to push us all toward more generous and powerful modes of looking at the world, served up with wit, intelligence, and love.

HARRON: Hi binchini, did you read this? It’s an essay by Masha Gessen about transitioning and how we value needs over wants on, like, every level, structured thematically around the Trump administration’s seven banned words. I’m feeling very activated by it. I haven’t really felt like this after reading something since I read Andrea Long Chu’s n+1 essay “On Liking Women,” which was also about transness and how we’re prone to frame wants as needs. Guess who’s needy and wanting!!!!

Gessen’s piece connects gayness, transness, and immigrant…ness with a critique of “born this way” rhetoric (‘memba her?!) in a way that feels amorphous enough to apply to, like, any marginalized group. Why do we always have to justify care with a defense like “THEY HAD NO CHOICE!!”? It reminds me of that tweet that was like, “I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people.”

LARISSA: HELLO MY BINCHOLETTE! YES I did read it and I was like “Mashaaaaa!” with my spirit flying into the air. What a great essay coming from someone I’ve been reading for a while now. I loved how centered it was on Gessen’s experience — it was so wonderful to follow along.

What I really love about Chu’s essay is how the whole thing is one long, stylish, rhetorical flip that I think captures a lot of the messiness of gender. (That phrase is… not good. “The messiness of gender, a senior thesis.”) It seems to me that people, especially cis people, desperately want to reason through things, as in, there must be some REASON why people are trans but… that’s not really what happens, is it? It is, like you said, about desire, among many other things, but it seems awfully difficult to convince people that it can be okay to do something because you want to. There seems to be this effort to always make it a rhetorical argument rather than engage with the material conditions of people’s lives.

This, now, is reminding me of how pinkwashed queerness tends to move away from explicit depictions or admissions of desire because that’s not how you Win Political Gains. Things are framed in terms of marriage, which is about love — not about sex, or access to care, especially health care, or desire.

When we’re thinking about who the middle is — who’s getting access, who’s getting political leverage, who’s being represented — it’s so consistently the white cis demographic. And that goes across pretty much every social movement.

HARRON: Noooo!!!! “The messiness of gender” is good!!!! I like it. I think I know what you’re trying to say by that with respect to Chu’s essay. She manages to compress years of often contradictory shifts in identity into a couple dozen paragraphs in really creative and at times messy ways. I wanna say “modalities,” but I’m not that kinda girl. It felt really true to what the first few weeks, months, and — I’m guessing — years after transitioning are like. You know you want to be a woman. Cool. Great. You got that figured out. But what kind of woman do you want to be? What kinds of women will you be while you figure that out? You’re kind of trying on selves until one feels right, sorta like what most people do in their teens and 20s except, like, compressed to make up for lost time.

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Sidenote: This whole thing’s making me think of Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way”? I guess that’s inevitable since Gessen references that phrasing so much in the New York Review of Books piece. That song’s very much about how it, like “doesn’t matter” that you’re different because you were “born this way,” meaning it’s not your fault. Sparkle, baby, sparkle! You can’t help it! I’m trying to think of what the equal and opposite of that song would be, like a pop song that’s so deeply infused with desire…maybe George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex”? This might be a deeply useless comparison, but nevertheless, she persisted. George Michael had a really complicated history with desire and how he acted on it privately and publicly. When his desire became public via that cruising arrest, it hurt him, personally and professionally, while Gaga’s public embrace of a need-based understanding of gayness only bolstered her career. Ally dynamics? Love it. Love the stuff.

I think about the moment that “Born This Way” came out a lot. Lady Gaga, anti-bullying campaigns, Glee, dreams of a post-racial, post-gay, post-identity presidency. I remember that 2010/2011 moment as being very interested in the idea of diversity yet deeply not into our actual diverse experiences, much less the root causes that accounted for these differences. Like, you want to celebrate something that hasn’t happened, and when someone tries to tell you why it hasn’t happened yet, you stick your big ostrich head in the ground. The anti-bullying “movement” that sprung up around that time feels really shallow in hindsight. Like, it was so coded without being about homophobia explicitly, sorta like how Human Rights Campaign canvassers were instructed to ask, “Do you have a minute to talk about human rights?” when what they really meant was, “Here’s some gay shit, my friend.” Was it all just about gay dudes trying to go back in time to retroactively prevent their self-esteem from getting trampled on? I mean, self-esteem is great, but like…not believing in myself hard enough isn’t really what’s holding me back in my adult life.

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LARISSA: It feels so much easier to frame these things in terms of feelings, like, It Gets Better! Sure, it gets better — if you can afford to move to a big city with progressive values. But it doesn’t really address the root causes of why things suck. It’s a very liberal tendency, I think, to dwell in these superficially emotional politics — it reminds me of being in high school and forming my school’s GSA (which we later called “Spectrum” to accommodate a fuller spectrum of queer identities. God, I love gay teens) which, by the way, we totally got bullied for! But our response to it was, in the language of the day, that it wasn’t fair to be unkind to people. It wasn’t nice. You had to be tolerant. But that’s not really an argument that holds water, is it? We didn’t know how to respond to bigots who didn’t care about our feelings. Because in the end, it doesn’t matter what someone’s feelings are. That’s not really a useful political stance, even if it’s a humane one. We don’t want self esteem — we want to be treated equally. And we want everyone to have the same rights and support systems that people with privilege already have.

When we’re thinking about who the middle is — who’s getting access, who’s getting political leverage, who’s being represented — it’s so consistently the white cis demographic. And that goes across pretty much every social movement. The structures of power tend to reiterate themselves, no matter what group they’re located in. We generally realize this and work to prevent it, but it feels pretty stark when you actually look at who has benefited most from the “progressive” political moves of the last decade or so.

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HARRON: Remember when Jennicet Gutiérrezinterrupted President Obama during a White House reception celebrating all the gains made for LGBTQ+ rights under his administration, calling on him to release all queer and trans people in ICE detention centers? She got booed and booted out, and then everyone cheered! Gross! There were so many instances like that before the repeal of DOMA, before the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” where mainstream LGBTQ+ groups like the HRC proactively excluded trans and immigration issues from their platforms because they “distracted” from their main goals of getting gays married and into the military.

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LARISSA: It’s so weird because I can guarantee if Jennicet Gutiérrez had done that during this Trump presidency, everyone would be stanning her. But people were kind of weird about the Obama administration? There seemed to be a lot of weird respectability politics involved. Probably because of the precarious condition of witnessing the first Black president — there seemed to be so much more to lose.

I’m also really interested in examining the “Born This Way” mindset because it does feel very archaic to me too. And I’ve been thinking a lot in my ~gender journey~ about how we need to give ourselves and each other the permission to change our minds. Like, we have to be okay with moving through identifying with different… identities. I hate that word but it works. We don’t have to end up somewhere static, we evolve as people and we’re fluid.

Like how you can start off identifying as bisexual and then queer and then wonder why you feel more or less queer than you should and then realize OH WAIT MAYBE IT’S MY GENDER and then stay more or less where you are but with the open door of realizing that you don’t have to be a woman all the time, you can identify as not-a-woman or maybe even nonbinary with like, 20% of your heart, and it will be fine. Not that I’m the expert on that or anything. What I’m saying is that we aren’t really born knowing what we will want and that should be okay! Desire should evolve! Isn’t that one of the core tenets of sexual consent, that it can be revoked at any time? Why shouldn’t we be allowed to change our minds?

It’s really hard to talk about desire, and the political nature of desire, because we want to believe that desire isn’t political.

HARRON: Omg like BE THE COSMIC BRAIN MEME YOU WISH TO SEE IN THE WORLD. My friend Zach made my favorite one of those. It was like I wish I was a girl > jk I’m straight > wait I’m bisexual > actually I’m gay, born this way baby and on and on until it just gets back to the original desire that started it all, stripped of all of the intellectualizing and theorizing. Like, I was making out with this dude last night, and — wait did I tell you about him?

LARISSA: You did!

HARRON: He literally lives, like, 110 feet away from my place. GOODBYE! So, this is the fourth time we’ve met up, and I was making out with him and started to ask him if he’d ever been with a trans woman before, which ahhhhhhhhhhhhh. I try really hard not to ask dudes that anymore, or at least not when I’m still getting to know them. It’s 100% just about indulging my own curiosity or, like, the part of my (cosmic) brain that doesn’t understand why anyone would be attracted to me. Am I their “thing”? Does it matter if I am? What answer do I even want? Am I just trying to force him to say “I AM ATTRACTED TO YOU BECAUSE YOU ARE A WOMAN AND I AM STRAIGHT”? Can’t his clear desire for me be enough? Why does he need to taxonomize it for my sake? Why do I? Am I that insecure in my womanhood that I need him to affirm it for me? Who’s chasing whom???? [Carrie Bradshaw voice] And then I wondered: In chasing the chaser, was I just chasing my tail?

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Sorry for that tired joke, but in my defense it’s your fault for letting a white woman into your life.

LARISSA: [Looks into camera] Reader, she loves her!!!!!!

But really, I do think it’s okay to want ask that question. I think it’s really natural and… maybe not healthy, but understandable to want to know why someone desires us and why they’re attracted to us. This is not 1:1 comparable, of course, but it reminds me of how I always ABSOLUTELY MUST KNOW whether a straight guy I’m seeing has dated an Asian girl before, and if so, whether it’s like — has he only dated Asian girls, because yikes!!!! But also, if he’s only ever dated white girls, that’s also yikes.

It’s really hard to talk about desire, and the political nature of desire, because we want to believe that desire isn’t political. And of course it isn’t, in that when you’re attracted to someone you’re probably not thinking about the politics of being into them. You just want to bump uglies. But at the same time, it’s totally political — there are some types of bodies that are represented as more desirable than others, and relevant to our conversation, there are certain kinds of womanhood that are consistently represented as more desirable and worthy of love than others. And that matters. It matters that we do or do not have access to representations of people who look like us being loved and cared for. Because that directly influences how we see ourselves, and also influences the kind of behavior we’re willing to put up with in order to feel loved, supported, sexy, desirable, you name it. I’m not normally a “representation matters!!!!!” kind of girl, but I absolutely stand behind this one.

HARRON: For sure. Ugh, this is making me think about that line in Moira Donegan’s piece for The Cut where she revealed that she started the “SHITTY MEDIA MEN” list. Like, we’re spending “hours dissecting the psychology of the kind of men who do not think about [our] interiority much at all.” I wonder if the dudes we’re talking about, the guys we worry might be chasers or fetishists or whatever, are asking themselves any of those questions. I mean, no, my gut tells me they’re not. And if they were, would that mean we’d have to talk them through it? Because that sounds like hell, too. Ugh, that guy’s texting me right now saying he’s gonna be home soon, and he’s… Oh god, I almost just said, “he’s sweet to me.” Who am I?? Of all the kinda girls I’m not, that’s apparently the kinda girl I am. Parse this later?

LARISSA: Next time on Bed Hang! Do we get a theme song? Should we write one? I love you!

Larissa Pham is a writer in New York. She is the author ofFantasian, a queer erotic novella from Badlands Unlimited, and her work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, Guernica, The Nation, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. Previously, she worked at the New York City Anti-Violence Project, focusing on support for survivors of sexual and other forms of violence.

Harron Walker is a freelance journalist based out of New York. Her work has appeared on Vice, BuzzFeed, Teen Vogue, Vulture, Into, Mask, and elsewhere.

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